I was going to call this post "modernist anger," actually, or perhaps "anger against modernists." It might not be wrong to use the word "anger."
As even a casual reader knows, there is often nothing easy about modernist texts. I imagine that Oprah Winfrey did not make a lot of friends by recommending to her audience some years ago a novel by William Faulkner. I love William Faulkner, but he is a difficult read. The first of his works assigned to me in university was the almost impenetrable Absalom, Absalom (1936), and I recall that I interpreted his difficulty as my shortcoming. Now, I think Oprah should challenge her readers to try more difficult books, but I wonder if they were properly primed for the experience. And I wonder if, upon having trouble, they got frustrated with reading, entirely.
But this is not a post about Oprah. It is about our reactions to encountering challenging books. It is certainly fair to say that, in part, modernists were willfully difficult. Many of them expected their readers to have an encyclopedic knowledge of culture, knowing that few of them did. Many other modernists were trying to make a point about perception by writing in a manner that mirrored, for example, the subjective way in which we experience passing time. The books that we are reading this semester, as autobiographies, are less challenging than novels, but they sometimes betray, very openly, a disdain for their readers or a willingness to sacrifice their readers' goodwill to modernism's greater ambitions.
So, instead of encountering texts that, inadvertently, make them question their prior learning, I have a classroom full of people encountering texts that, in some sense, insult them. You can imagine the reaction.
Some modernists took the slogan, "The plain reader be damned!" Fourth-year English majors have more background than anyone understood to be "plain readers," but they do not like being damned: that is damned certain.
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